What I learned in year 2020

Year 2020 was a difficult year for us. For me it was a year of intensive learning and reflection. I read more than 12,000+ pages in 30+ e-books. Here is a breakdown of categories:

You can find the main themes, how they affect our lives and distilled them to easy-to-read items with recommendations. It is really hard to condense that information to couple of pages so it is not intended to be summary of all of the books by any means. 

This article does not include all categories but contains ideas that emerge as generalizations out of them. The recommended way to read is to have a calm environment and reflect on each item.

Book Recommendations

For those that want to read the books, I have also selected one book from each category except for Science since there was not enough books to choose from. Categories are in alphabetical order.

Interpreting Life

• Information Overload: We are not getting used to being bombarded by information but falling victim to it. Our attention spans are getting shorter. Our memory of events is fading, and we are losing our sense of time. We are having difficulty assessing trends that matter from noise or hype that is being broadcasted.
• Reading the situation: Doing the same things over and over makes us good at what we do, but also makes us vulnerable in the light of ambiguities. We lose our ability to make sound judgements for the world we are living in.
• Misinterpreting our capabilities: We are getting used to searching the web for information instantly thinking that we can capture and attain wisdom out of it. Web is trying to teach common sense which should be distilled by years of experience.

My recommendations:

• Nothing beats actionable information that is distilled by combining observant experience with learning from other people’s experiences. The emphasis is on experiences, not content nuggets or facts.
• Acquire, new perspectives to view your current situation such the ones given below. Watch out for trapping yourself into a narrow or shallow way of thinking.
• Short-Long Term: Try to look from now, a day, a year or even a century back
• Us- versus them: Who are the stakeholders and why are they grouped that way?
• What-ifs: Try to lift some of the constraints you perceive and rethink the situation. This is your most powerful tool, use it.

Learning

• Expiry date of Information: Everything we learn reflects the reality in certain point in time. As change is accelerating, whatever you learn will loose its validity sooner than what you observed 5 years ago.
• Perspectives: Internet is making it easier to form/join groups with similar sentiments. This makes it easy to spiral down to a state where you can’t see the world from other points of view and not feel to need to learn different perspectives. 

My recommendations:

• The worst enemy we have is our vulnerability to misinformation. We need to educate ourselves and everybody around us to judge every information we are receiving over different channels. If somebody is telling about something as if it is a fact without giving credible references, it is most likely not true. Select where you get your information wisely and check trustworthiness of your sources regularly.
• Try to corroborate information from multiple sources and wait for feedback for at least couple of days. Try to get information from people with different perspectives. Repeated information does not mean it’s true.
• You need to have a strategy for learning that you should be constantly updating. How to consume content so that it sticks for longer? How to improve to sense misinformation? What type of content requires which type of learning strategy?
• Learning a second language is a door to learning new perspectives. You need to know at least 2 human languages (no, computer languages do not count) together with the cultural backgrounds (no, being able to speak does not count either) and look what life throws at you from different angles.
• Learning takes time and energy. Balance wisely on where you want to spend this effort, there is diminishing returns on trying to learn something that you will not benefit often from. However leave room for serendipity, sometimes learning an obscure craft, can help you in unexpected ways. 

Health

• What to expect from doctors: Doctors are specialists that are under oath to improve your health. They have a specific way of thinking which can be very strict however, they cannot know your wellbeing better than you.
• Connected systems: Human body can not be understood by studying each part in isolation. It is an interconnected system of systems that you need to understand as a whole.
• Find a way to manage stress: Only people without stress are in cemeteries. You can’t live with it, but you can learn to actively manage it. 

My recommendations:

• Learn to the point of being able to give good and sound health advice to yourself. You have a much longer time to observe yourself than your doctor. You should be able to decide if you need a specialist doctor or cure yourself.
• Be curious, be willing to test your limits mentally, physically and emotionally.
• Do not consume alcohol, caffeine or nicotine to alleviate stress. Consume to the point of enjoyment not more.
• Moderately exercise watch your limits and tune your activity. Your level of activity may vary widely over the years but you can most likely do more than you can imagine.
• Get proper 7-9 hours, sleep consistently.
• Socialize In person (zoom is acceptable, instant messaging and email are not) to create meaningful relationships.

Pandemic

• This is emotional: Pandemic is not only the physical disease we are experiencing. It is about how the whole world feeling hopelessness. How to deal with this physically has not been changed for centuries, but to we lack experience to deal the emotional stress since it has not happened in the last generation. It will be much harder to cope and will impact our psychology for long time.
• It will take a long time to stabilize: Technically we are at the beginning of understanding the virus SARS-CoV-v2. We will need to study for years to understand how it spreads, its effects and how to cure. Our bodies will take generations to adapt to this pathogen It will also redefine our unconscious reflexes, relationships and cultures.

My recommendations:

• Acknowledge how vulnerable we really are, let is sink and guide you through your choices in life.
• Learn how you can keep yourself strong mentally, physically and emotionally, for years to come. It won’t be easy and you will need to transform yourself.
• Learn to channel your emotions to be more creative and productive. 

Entrepreneurship

• Work landscape will change: We have been living a standardized life for too long. We are about to witness major shifts on how we live, work and enjoy ourselves which has accelerated due to the pandemic.
• Trust versus creativity: Our comfort zones are our secret enemies. Our nature is to thrive on what we don’t know. If you feel safe, you are losing your edge. You can’t be creative unless you feel the pressure for it.
• Is market ready?: All great ideas will be in the minority when they emerge. However there is a specific point in time, when you introduce an innovation, it catches like wildfire, not before, not after.
• Fail-Try again cycles: There is no success for everything you try. You need to have a growth mindset but you should also be willing to try and fail.
• Optimization maybe evil: Change is accelerating. If you see an opportunity for a problem through optimized solution, hold on. It is becoming more common that the idea may become obsolete before a need for optimization. 

My recommendations:

• Be open to what is happening around you and search for what will stay the same around all the hype of change. That’s the point that you need to build your business on.
• Make a habit out of getting out of your comfort zone regularly. If you see yourself doing a specific thing the same way for a long time, try to do it differently even if you feel it would have a sub-optimal outcome.
• When you fail for A, you learn how not to fail for A, B and C and you might figure out how to do D, which is much more valuable than failing A, but you can not achieve this if you do not try. 
• Educate yourself on how markets are evolving and when its ripe for people to identify the problem and solution. 

Management

• Balance prioritization with value realization: We are living in an age where we constantly re-prioritize with adding new tasks. Getting the value for your effort or finishing what you started also adds value and should not be postponed as a habit. Short term gains with starting something new, makes us blind to what has already started and needs to finish to realize value.
• Elders:  It is becoming common to have multiple generations in the workplace, where higher the rank, higher the age is not the norm. This brings new challenges and new opportunities which needs to be managed. 

My recommendations:

• When working with teams of people and different teams there is always a trade-off. Make sure you make those trade offs visible between individuals in a team or between teams.
• Having a person with lots of experience in different fields, adds much more than just an opinion to a group. They tend to bring new perspectives which can identify problems, the group was not aware they had. 

Conclusion

Hard times have an enormous potential to shape us. I tried to summarize what I learned through experiences of others. I urge you to think for yourself and share what you learned in comments.